Information Technology & Tourism, Vol. 9 pp. 133–144 1098-3058/07 $60.00 + .00 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. Copyright  2007 Cognizant Comm. Corp. www.cognizantcommunication.com INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PUBLICATIONS IN LEADING TOURISM JOURNALS: A STUDY OF 1985 TO 2004 ROSANNA LEUNG* AND ROB LAW† *Timmical Travel Services Ltd, Hong Kong †School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Despite the extensive range of applications and the dependence of the tourism industry on Informa- tion Technology (IT), up to the present time the existing tourism literature has only a limited number of published articles, if any, that give an overview of the progress of IT publications over the past two decades. This article reports on a study that analyzed the published IT papers in three leading research journals in tourism, and examined the trend of IT research based on the publica- tions. Excluding book reviews, research notes, reports, commentaries, and case studies, these three journals published a total of 2,135 full-length research papers during the period 1985 to 2004. Among these full-length research papers, only 55 full-length IT-related papers were found. More- over, IT applications were grouped into six categories. This study revealed that networking was the most widely published category and with the highest growth rate in 1995–2004. Empirical findings are also compared with the publications in the journal Information Technology & Tourism (ITT) and mainstream IT journals. This article contributes to review the progress of IT research that tourism researchers have performed and published over the past two decades in leading tour- ism journals. Key words: Leading tourism journals; Information technology; Publications; Content analysis Introduction ally, inexpensive removable storage media that are used as storage devices for images (still or mov- ing) and sound are now commonplace. Due to The present tourism industry has been deeply affected by advanced technological developments these innovations, technology can be used effec- tively to connect different tourism sectors and in- (Bentley, 1996). Examples of the recently devel- oped technologies include fiber optics, broadband- dividual consumers. Lyons (2000) commented that IT is a useful tool for the tourism industry that can enriched networks and telecommunication applica- tions, and personal computers that are as powerful match the requirements of demand and supply. As an example, serving as part of tourism products, as mainframe computers in the 1980s. Addition- Address correspondence to Rob Law, School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. E-mail: hmroblaw@polyu.edu.hk 133